Beyond Selidor

I'm reminded of what Tasha Suri tweeted about also - if we demand only #ownvoices, we're going to miss out on a lot of stories by authors, especially POC authors, where it isn't safe to be out. Demanding people out their identities or trauma is deeply unsettling.

I totally agree. Nobody owes any Twitter mob any more of their identity or experiences than they are willing to share. This escalating demand to do so basically hands a weapon to anyone who wishes to harm you.

The line about author contracts requiring an active social media presence certainly starts to explain why YA authors are more 'online' than other genres.

I think I've talked about this with you in the past, but I used to be a newspaper book reviewer of YA novels, during the time period covering 2001-2013. Right up until the last years of this period, I was always dealing with specialist marketing departments — they'd either have sent my newspaper a batch of ARCs for review, or I'd be able to ring up or email the relevant department, get through to a named individual and request a copy of the specific book I wanted to review. Same went for author interviews — they'd either reach out to my paper directly, or I would contact the marketing/publicity team and request an interview, and they'd help me set it up. This was all presumably viewed as worthwhile, and the assumption was that my reviews and interviews would be read by the adult parents who read the paper, who would then go out and buy the books for their teenage children. (There was no assumption that teenagers were reading my reviews, and indeed although my early shtick was that I was a teenager reviewing YA professionally, my editor told me always to remember that I was writing for parents, not the teens who would read the books.)

That entire infrastructure disappeared at some point in the past decade (so too did most newspaper book reviewing, to be fair), and instead all the marketing (unless the author was a bestseller or writing acclaimed literary fiction) fell on authors. They had to be online, do unpaid 'blog tours', commission artists to do preorder giveaway campaigns, work with Youtubers and Bookstagram types, and so on. This change is particularly acute in YA because I suspect there's a misapprehension that those writing for a teen readership need to be on social media where the teens are!

I have seen more authors / high-profile readers/reviewers on Instagram and I suppose at first glance it certainly allows a level of control, but both Twitter and Instagram can be very individualist focused.

Any platform that allows others to share your content with the click of a button (which is possible in Instagram) is going to have the same problems that Twitter does. It's calmer than Twitter at the moment, but that's because people leave most of their vitriol and social media activism on Twitter, not because Instagram prevents that sort of thing!